Monday, May 3. 2021

Today's classes are:

9:15 - 11:50 B Block Human Geography

12:30 - 3:05 C Block Legal Studies

B Block Human Geography - Today I lose you from 9:30 to 10:30. The Comox Valley School District has secured the services of Kerri Isham of Power Up Education to supplement the Sexual Health Curriculum this year for the Grade 11 and 12 students in the district. Today, your topic in a Zoom meeting is Steps to Safer Sex and either you or your parents will be able to contact Kerri Isham with follow-up questions/concerns or comments at kerri@powerupeducation.com The purpose of sexual health education is to:

1. Provide students the knowledge, understanding, skills and attitudes they will need to make and act upon decisions that promote sexual health throughout their lives.
2. Provide age-appropriate information to promote healthy behavior.
3. Reduce the negative impact media has on our young people (explicit, unrealistic and often undignified sexual images and messages).
4. Allow students to talk openly and honestly about sexuality.
5. Positively impact the health and well-being of the community.

After, we'll try to answer the Key Question "Why Is Global Population Increasing"? Geographers most frequently measure population change in a country or the world as a whole through three measures -  crude birth rate, crude death rate, and natural increase rate and we'll look at those today along with measures of fertility and mortality along with population pyramids.


You'll have some questions to work on for me in order to understand our key concept:

1. About how many people are being added to the world’s population each year?
2. How does the TFR in your family compare to the overall figure for North America? 
3. Match the Country with the population pyramid and explain why (Canada, Chad & Germany)
4. Name a type of community that might have a lot more males than females. Why so?

We'll also play around a bit on Gapminder to visualize these statistics

C Block Legal Studies -Today we'll look at Rodriguez v British Columbia (Attorney General), 1993 - which deals with Section 7 of the Charter (life, liberty and security of the person). For more information on the fight in Canada for the right to die on one's own terms look at the CBC In Depth site on the Sue Rodriguez case. In 2011, Gloria Taylor from Kelowna filed a case in B.C. Supreme Court to grant her the right to a doctor-assisted suicide. More info on this case can be found here.

In February 2015, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in Carter v. Canada that parts of the Criminal Code would need to change to satisfy the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The parts that prohibited medical assistance in dying would no longer be valid. So in June 2016, the Parliament of Canada passed federal legislation that allows eligible Canadian adults to request medical assistance in dying. HOWEVER a Quebec court ruling struck down the existing legislation on medically assisted death on the grounds that it was too restrictive. The court gave the government until Dec. 18 (2020) to implement a new regime. Bill C-7, (the proposed new MAID law which is currently "in committee" in the Senate, as of Dec. 17, 2020) expands the categories of those eligible for the procedure, opening it up to people whose deaths aren't reasonably foreseeable, but imposes strict guidelines for people seeking assisted death as part of that category, including a 90-day waiting period. 

From the government of Canada's site on the proposed MAID law...

Section 7 protects the rights to life, liberty and security of the person and prohibits government interference with these interests unless done in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice. These include the principles against arbitrariness, overbreadth and gross disproportionality. An arbitrary law is one that impacts section 7 rights in a way that is not rationally connected to the law’s purpose. An overbroad law is one that impacts section 7 rights in a way that, while generally rational, goes too far by capturing some conduct that bears no relation to the law’s purpose. A grossly disproportionate law is one whose effects on section 7 rights are so severe as to be “completely out of sync” with the law’s purpose.

Section 15(1) of the Charter protects equality rights. It provides that every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination, including on the basis of mental or physical disability.

In Carter v. Canada (2015), the Supreme Court of Canada held that a competent adult’s response to a grievous and irremediable medical condition is a matter critical to their dignity and autonomy. A criminal prohibition on MAID for a person in this situation – whom the law would permit to request palliative sedation, refuse artificial nutrition and hydration or request the removal of life-sustaining medical equipment – impacts liberty and security of the person. This is because the criminal prohibition interferes with the ability to make decisions concerning bodily integrity and leads to serious suffering. Broadening the law to permit MAID for persons whose natural death is not reasonably foreseeable would promote the liberty and security of the person interests of individuals who seek MAID as a response to a grievous and irremediable illness.

So, after, we'll talk about equality and look at section 15 of the Charter. We'll look at the difference between prejudice and discrimination. Equality is understood to have four meanings:

1. Equal before the law
2. Equal under the law
3. Equal benefit
4. Equal protection

It may be surprising to note that this clause was one of the more controversial issues of the constitutional debate. Some provinces did not see the need for equality rights to be written into the Charter since provincially human rights codes were seen as protection enough.

The phrase "before and under the law" is significant because it means that not only do people have equal access to the courts and to equal administration of justice (the "before" part) but that the laws that are discriminatory will be struck down by the courts (the "under" part). So in Andrews v. Law Society of British Columbia, [1989] 1 S.C.R. 143 Mark Andrews met all the requirements to become a lawyer in British Columbia, but he did not have Canadian citizenship. Because he did not meet the citizenship requirement, he was not accepted. Andrews challenged the provincial law, which prevented him from being a lawyer, arguing that it was discriminatory since it treated non-citizens and Canadian citizens differently. The majority of the Supreme Court decided that the provincial law infringed equality rights, because it did not let otherwise qualified people practice law solely because of their citizenship.

This case was the Court’s first decision on equality rights. It has influenced the development of equality law well beyond the specific facts of Mr. Andrew’s case, because Justice McIntyre emphasized that section 15 of the Charter protects and promotes substantive equality of opportunity for all. The court has added the following grounds (analogous to those enumerated) in section 15 (1):

1. Non-citizenship (Andrews, supra; Lavoie v. Canada, [2002] 1 S.C.R. 769);
2. Marital status (Miron v. Trudel, [1995] 2 S.C.R. 418; Nova Scotia (Attorney General) v. Walsh, [2002] 4 S.C.R. 325; Quebec v. A., supra);
3. Sexual orientation (Egan v. Canada, [1995] 2 S.C.R. 513; Vriend, supra; M. v. H., [1999] 2 S.C.R. 3: Little Sisters, supra); and
4. Aboriginality-residence as it pertains to a member of an Indian Band living off the reserve (Corbiere v. Canada (Minister of Indian and Northern Affairs), [1999] 2 S.C.R. 203).

To finish the class, I'll have you work on questions:

•  1-3 on page 54;  
•  1, 2 and 5 on page 56